When he learnt potatoes contain all the nutrients humans need, Tom Sykes set out to survive a whole week by eating nothing else

Friday 4 July 2008 19:32 BST

Did you know that the humble potato contains all the vitamins, minerals, proteins and calories necessary for life?

Theoretically, a healthy adult could prolong their existence indefinitely on a diet composed exclusively of spuds and water. In fact, when he was imprisoned by the Prussians during the Seven Years' War in the 18th century, the Frenchman Antoine-Augustin Parmentier did just that.

To this day, the eponymous Potage Parmentier - a hearty leek and potato soup found on the table of any discerning French countryman - celebrates his resilience in the face of such cruel and unusual gastronomic deprivation.

Tom Sykes turned into Mr Potato Head for a week

Tom Sykes turned into Mr Potato Head for a week

Given that a 10kg bag of Golden Wonders costs a little over a fiver, the Potato Council recently suggested that a more tuber-centric diet could be a thrifty way to shave pounds off the family food bill in the face of the credit crunch.

So, I reasoned, how bad could a mere week of subsisting on the most democratic of vegetables be? There was only one way to find out... Welcome to my potato week.

Friday

The prospect of a week spent living largely off potatoes might at first seem a pretty unappealing one.

And, as I flipped and gently fried a pan of Irish potato cakes until they turned a crisp, golden brown at 8am on Day One of my potato week challenge, I couldn't help feeling I had embarked on a starchy exercise in gastronomic monotony that would result only in weight gain, constipation and a longing for a nice piece of steak.

However, I brightened as I sat down to eat my first meal - the potato cakes were delicious, if a little greasy - and my wife Sasha handed me a cookbook entitled The Potato Year: 365 Ways Of Cooking Potatoes by Irish chef and spud-devotee Lucy Madden.

Reading it, as I shovelled forkfuls of refried mashed potato into my mouth, I underwent a brief but powerful culinary conversion. Madden's privately published book was full of exciting and - gasp! - mouthwatering recipes. It was to be my Bible for the next seven days.

A lunch of thick potato soup filled me up - but then, suddenly, at 6pm I was ravenous. So my two-year-old son and I knocked up some potato doughnuts, using 30z of cooked mashed potatoes, 10oz flour, a little sugar, some ground coffee, milk and oil for frying to a recipe from Madden's book.

I was so hungry I ate them directly out of the oven and promptly burnt my mouth. The taste? Not bad, not bad at all.

For dinner I partook of stodgy Kartofflekrapfen - a Bulgarian national dish created by crushing boiled potatoes through a sieve into a glutinous mixture of milk, butter, nutmeg and eggs and then frying them. I felt sick, not hungry afterwards. And I could feel the grease oozing out of my skin. This could turn out to be a very painful week.

I was woken early on Day Two by a noise like the engine of an articulated truck turning over. It was the rumbling in my tummy. I was starving.

For breakfast I prepared a recipe for potato and bacon cakes from a leaflet issued by the Ministry of Food in 1946, when Britain was in the grip of post-war rationing. It took about an hour - and I didn't even get as far as coating them with milk and breadcrumbs - but I was pleased to note that the cakes themselves were baked rather than fried. They were remarkably light and quite stunningly delicious.

Lunch was a huge bowl of potato mashed with wasabi - a Japanese horseradish - to add interest, while for dinner my wife made me a spicy yellow curry containing red potatoes, white potatoes and sweet potatoes. Who said there's no variety in an all-potato diet?

I am definitely becoming a potato fan. I'm in good company, according to the humourist A.A. Milne, who once said: 'If a fellow really likes potatoes, he must be a pretty decent sort of fellow.' Perhaps the next few days won't be such an ordeal after all.

Potatoes consumed: 5lbCost: £4.50 (£2 for the bacon)

Sunday

Blame Dr Atkins and his all-protein diet if you will, but I couldn't shake the nagging doubt that subsisting largely off potatoes was a deeply unhealthy idea. After all, the potato has suffered worse Press than Amy Winehouse in recent years.

We tend to think of the humble spud as nothing but carbs - maybe this is why fewer than 20 per cent of meals eaten by under-35s contain potatoes.

In fact, potatoes are packed full of vitamins and minerals, including iron, potassium more vitamin C than an apple, and vitamins B6 and B1. During World War II, government information leaflets advised Britons to eat 'at least 1lb of potatoes daily' to provide vitamin C to 'prevent against fatigue and help fight infection'.

Government scientists expended great energy teaching people how to prepare potatoes correctly to get the maximum benefit from them. Housewives were advised not to stand or soak chopped spuds in saucepans of cold water, to use potato water for making soups and gravies, and to re-use uneaten potatoes by substituting them for flour when making pastry, pancakes and scones.

I long ago stopped peeling spuds - even for mashed potato - as you get rid of the lion's share of the fibre when you dispose of the skins. Wartime government advice sternly cautioned:

'If you must peel them, peel them thinly.' When it comes to potato skins, the wartime jingle issued by Lord Woolton's Ministry of Food was unequivocal on the subject:

Those who have the will to winCook potatoes in their skinKnowing that the sight of peelingsDeeply hurts Lord Woolton's feelings.

Most of the wartime recipes are good, but 'no-fat roast potatoes', for which you put chopped potatoes in a tray half-filled with salty water and bake the liquid off, are the exception. They are truly disgusting.

Pity my poor stomach, which feels simultaneouly bloated and empty. My metabolism is struggling, too - I seem to have huge energy surges straight after a meal, followed by an equally dramatic slump four or five hours later that leaves me feeling utterly lethargic and starving.

Can I cope with yet another day of spuds?

Potatoes consumed: 5lbCost: £2.50

Monday

The bad news: My dreams were disturbed by visions of fat, juicy steaks and sizzling sausages. The good news: When I wake, I am relieved to find that my digestive functions also appear to have returned to normal.

In terms of getting enough food, my body is discovering that the trick is to eat and eat and eat until you can eat no more at every meal.

This will sustain me until the hunger pangs return - but when they do come back, they do so with a vengeance.

By 6pm, I am ravenous, so imagine my delight when I discover that our Canadian au pair, Steph, has decided to help out with the potato challenge by making her 'Mom's' golden potato rolls. The secret recipe includes yeast, warm water, milk, butter, plenty of mashed potatoes and sugar.

The golden potato rolls are absolutely out of this world - buttery and much lighter than one would imagine - more like a brioche than anything else.

I wolf down five or six of them and they keep me going till dinner - which is a huge baked spud with the filling scooped out, mashed into cheese and butter then stuffed back in and lightly grilled.

Tuesday

I awake on Day Five with a feeling of grim determination. The prospect of another day of pure potatoes fills me with gastronomic despair, but I know I must carry on.

The sight of potatoes began to fill Tom Sykes with gastronomic despair

The sight of potatoes began to fill Tom Sykes with gastronomic despair

I attempt to raise my spirits by reflecting on just how small my food bill this week will be. The potato farls (a sort of potato pancake) I have for breakfast are the only prepared foodstuff I have bought all week - 50p from Tesco.

I also use the bread maker I have purloined from my parents-in-law to make bread, substituting half the flour for mashed potato, resulting in a rather stodgy, but uncommonly tasty loaf.

I am eating what seems like extraordinary quantities of potatoes now - up to 6lb a day. That sounds a lot - but historically it is, well, small potatoes. In 1844, before the Irish potato famine, the average adult Irishman ate about 13lb of potatoes daily. That's about 450 normalsized potatoes a week.

The Irish famine is a tragic testament to just how incredibly efficient potatoes are at feeding humans. An acre of land planted with potatoes produces four times as much food as the same plot planted with corn - which is why the UN has designated 2008 the year of the potato - and is much easier to harvest and prepare.

But when it came, the potato blight - phythophthora infestans to give it its proper name - led to more than a million people, some 12 per cent of Ireland's population, dying of starvation. Another million fled overseas. Ireland was part of Britain, but in London the government almost entirely abandoned the country to its fate.

For dinner I conduct a taste test. I steam 1lb each of Wexford Supremes, Golden Wonders, Kerrs Pinks and Roosters and place them all in separate bowls in front of me, drizzled with a little butter and chopped parsley from the garden. Here are my tasting notes:

Wednesday

Can man live on potato alone? Possibly, but a bit of bacon, cabbage and some onions are definitely a big help in the quest.

You would also need a great deal of time on your hands. The recipe for potato and onion hotpot, for example, takes 20 minutes to prepare and another hour to cook (although it's well worth it). The potato bhurtas are basically extremely spicy Indian potato cakes laced with lemon juice and chillis. I am starving again so I eat five - about 2lb of spuds all told. I'm starting to see how it might be possible to get through 90lb a week if potatoes were your sole food and you were labouring in the fields all day.

In fact, dependency on potatoes may be our future, not just our past. According to author John Reader's book, Propitious Esculent: The Potato In World History, there are proposals for a micro-plantation of potatoes onboard the first manned mission to Mars, due to blast off two decades from now.

Not only will the plants provide nourishment for the astronauts, but they will also supply all the oxygen that the space traveller needs, and recycle exhaled carbon dioxide in the form of breathable air as well. As esculents go (that's edible substances), it's hard to get much more propitious than that.

Potatoes consumed: 8lbCost: £6 (including vegetables and bacon)

Thursday

Breakfast: Potato bread.Lunch: Potato and corn chowder.Dinner: Rosti

The Swiss national dish rosti made a fittingly celebratory end to my great potato challenge. I grated all the left-over boiled spuds I could find into a frying pan with plenty of butter and a little salt.

After a few minutes of frying on a low heat you form the grated potato into a pancake shape, sit a plate on top of it and press down. You leave the plate in the pan, and then ten minutes later flip the pancake onto the plate and its done.

Grating does something to the spuds - they become caramelised and crunchy thanks to the butter and the low heat. It was an astoundingly toothsome meal.

I was so proud of my rosti that I emailed a picture to a friend with a chalet in the Swiss Alps. He agreed that even on a computer screen, my rosti would not have disgraced the table of the finest Alpine restaurant.

Potatoes consumed: 7lbCost: £3.50

Verdict

As I lay on the sofa and allowed my stomach to get to work digesting the enormous mound of vegetables in my stomach, I can only conclude that my potato week had been a decidedly mixed experience.

Yes, there were times when my stomach felt like it was trying to digest a ton of house bricks.

But the Potato Council is quite right that eating more potatoes makes good economic sense. Even allowing for extra ingredients, my food bill for the week was less than £30, and many of the dishes had fed the whole family.

Along with the rosti, the best creations were the potage Parmentier, the potato and onion hotpot, and the potato and bacon cakes which were baked in the oven. Steph's mum's golden potato rolls will linger long in my memory.

But, astonishingly, the biggest revelation of all came at lunch the following day. I automatically popped five Roosters in the steamer. Half an hour later I sat down to eat them.

True perfection, I realised, as I set my plate on the table, is a piping hot potato, steamed in its jacket as nature intended, and unadorned except for a drizzle of butter and some freshly chopped herbs from the garden.

As the old Irish saying goes: 'If beef's the king of meat, potato's the queen of the garden world.'